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1.       The Piece I chose is “Crying Girl” by Roy Lichtenstein. It was located at the Millwaukee Art Museum during our trip. Roy was one of the most prominent Pop Artists of the century. His work was favored mostly for its use of old comic strip parodies. During the height of his career he was featured in the Castelli Gallery in New York along side other Pop Artists  such as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.

2.       “Crying Girl” was located in the Modern art section of the Millwaukee Art Museum with a wide variety of artists and techniques that were brought mostly out of the 20^th Century. The piece was not accompanied with much information other than the artist, title, and the date it was created (1964). It is a fairly large canvas approximately five feet square and probably composed of oil paints on white stretched canvas. The woman shown in the painting is composed of flat black lines filled in with flat primary and basic colors. The detail of the character is very low and resembles that of an ink stamp or screen print. Although the colors are flat, Lichtenstein created dimension and texture on her face with his signature comic book pointillism. This gave it much of a news print comic feel. It is a very highly contrasted image with a low diversity of value and colors. At glance it is a very large and simple image.

3.       Many critics would describe the Pop Art movement to be an “American” movement but Roy Lichtenstein would disagree as he claimed his work and others to be “industrial art”. He explained that he would never attempt to reproduce his subjects but to tackle the way that the mass media sees them. This is easily understandable, not at first with “Crying Girl”, but after looking at many similar works by Lichtenstein. His characters look like they were ripped right out of news paper and magnified for a closer look at it’s social obscenities. His message in my eyes was a mockery of how these men and women, such as in “crying girl”, are portrayed to be. The mass media has this simple idea of how a person should look and act and Lichtenstein takes a highlighter to point these out in his art. The red lipstick and wavy blonde hair. The romantic ideal of these comic strips is the fantasy that the media has created for most Americans who see them. This is a common trend of “Pop” art, to take figures and images from the media and distorting them and exposing them for what they may be underneath the glamour. Another one of Lichtensteins more famous paintings “Whaaam!” is an image of a fighter jet destroying another. At first glance one would see it as a war comic strip, but under Roy’s looking glass you see the blood red fire of the explosion that is protruding from the dying pilot’s plane. This is just another example that Roy highlights from the mass media where the idea of killing and war is glorified into this heroic thing to take part in. Much of this can be derived from his experiences in World War II. Over all the painting is simple and almost unoriginal, but as an idea and as a concept it is an individual commentary on how the mass media distorts what we see as iconic.

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